AI agents match specialists on TheoPhysEval physics calculations

Key points

• GPT-6-Astra solved 49 of 50 unpublished theoretical physics problems, scoring 98 percent, in OpenAI's Codex environment.
• Total benchmark cost was about $116, roughly $2.40 per problem for Astra, per the authors' figures.
• Opus 5.5 scored 92 percent; Gemini 3.8 Flash reached 68 percent, with open-weight models at 42 and 54 percent.
• Authors say several misses were answer-key errors, and they doubt physics breakthroughs will follow until agents show research 'taste'.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams relying on AI for technical accuracy gain a cheap, public benchmark to test models, while answer-key errors suggest checking reference data before trusting scores.